


Des the Boot

by RenrijraKrin



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-26 00:07:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14389953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RenrijraKrin/pseuds/RenrijraKrin
Summary: This city guard kicked a cat. You won’t believe what happened next





	Des the Boot

On Brussendar 16th, 835 P.D., I moved into my single room corner of the barracks after the last workman had finished his labours. The restoration had been a simple task, yet because the workmen spent more time on break than working it had come at no small expense. The place had not been inhabited since early in the reign of Bertrand Dwendal, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had struck down the previous tenant.

Life was gentle at first, as much as it can ever be for a man of shallow pockets. The weeks went by without incident, work mostly consisted of standing around looking stern, yelling and getting yelled at. The bums felt my wrath, an extension of my boss’, which in turn was an extension of his superior’s and so on, a deep and winding wrath ever-raging that probably stretched all the way to the throne, its roots growing from the emperor’s stony heart, cold as the steel that forged his empire. A fitting foundation for the long arm of the law, with me and my buddies as the fist.

Then it all changed. We were standing guard outside the Tri-Spires, keeping out the riff-raff like usual. A fancy looking tiefling goes in, dirty hobo stays out. Then this cat appeared, weird-looking somehow, thinking it’s slinking right by me. A quick kick should teach it, I think, that the law also has long legs when the need arises. Except it didn’t go quite right. I kicked it alright, and it yowled like you’d expect, but after that it all went wrong. It sorta… poofed. Gone. Obliterated.

The guys loved it. First I’m Desmond Doom-toe, then Des the Boot, then Deathboot the Destroyer. Some of the weirdos we dragged to the cells even seemed to take it seriously. I enjoyed the attention. It was a great ice-breaker, a story that got better and better as it was retold over countless mugs of ale.

But all good things must pass. A few days ago things started to get weird. A cat yowling outside my window prompted me to step outside to employ my newfound powers, but when I got out the noise stopped and the creature was nowhere to be seen. Shortly after I returned to my room it started again, then stopped once I peered out. In the end I ran all around the building looking for the little beast, but there was nothing there. As soon as I got back in it resumed its torture. I eventually succumbed to sleep despite the incessant wailing, but was harassed even then by horrible dreams. I seemed to be looking down at a dim sewer, knee-deep with filth, where a red-bearded hobo drove before him a flock of strange, outlandish creeps whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the hobo stopped and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of enormous spiders rained down on the stinking darkness and fell to devouring man and woman alike.

From this terrific vision I awoke to little comfort, for as my laboured breathing calmed I could hear strange noises in the dark. There was something scratching at the walls, but for all my fumbling in the darkness I couldn’t find its origin. I went to work a shade of myself, too tired to do much more than look mean.

The next night went similar to the last. An unseen cat wailed without pause, escaping my every attempt at locating it, ignoring my own shouts entirely. Covering my ears as best I could I eventually drifted off to sleep, but found no more refuge there than the previous night. I dreamed I sat staring into a roaring hearth on a cold night, yet it was no comfort to me. The fire was wrong. I stared and found I could not look away. The crackling of the logs slowly grew louder, then morphed into a peculiar whining, which grew ever louder until it rose into a crescendo of wailing as in the flames I saw anguished faces. I sat still, staring, until the veiled figures reached fumbling hands out of the hungry fire and I held out my own hands to reach for them and the flame ran up my arms and as I opened my mouth and screamed, searing flames bubbled out of my mouth.

Again I woke to noises in the night and again I could find no source. The day passed agonizingly slowly, so tired was I that even the captain’s yelling couldn’t rile me up enough to let the lowlifes on the street have it. Only once I got home and was confronted by a neighbour who asked me to keep it down at night did I find the energy to give someone a bruise.

That night followed the same old pattern. I didn’t even bother looking for the damned cat and just went to sleep. I dreamt of running through a small village filled with screams. I ran through darkened streets amid the sound of battle and bloodshed, darting into shabby buildings and grabbing whatever little objects struck me as useful or interesting. I kept going, ignoring the sounds around me, the spatters of blood on the wall, until I was met in one of the buildings by a tiny shriek. I froze and locked eyes with a terrified little girl and suddenly I could see what she saw: A hunched little monster with long, spindly arms, bloodshot eyes and a row of jagged teeth gleaming in the dark.

The scratching at the walls persisted, but I didn’t bother moving. Once dawn broke I inspected the walls closely, but there seemed no possibility of anything having infiltrated them. The lads joked at work, asking me whether I’d finally found a girl to keep me up at night. In the evening I hit the pub and got deeply into my cups.

The noise that evening was less of a problem due to the mercies of ale, but still my dreams were troubled. This time I was a little doll, locked behind a pane of glass looking down onto a busy street far below. I could do nothing but watch as people passed by my window, laughing and loving as I looked on. Occasionally people would come into the building, and an achingly beautiful, haunting voice would sing somewhere behind me, but I could never turn to look. Time passed agonizingly, days and weeks and months and years flowing sluggishly beneath my window. I would scream but find I had no voice, cry and find I had no tears, blink and find I had no eyelids. After what felt like years I finally heard a new sound in my life. At first I couldn’t fathom where it was coming from, for the people were walking and the voice was singing same as ever. Only when night fell and silence seeped in did I realize I was laughing.

I woke up with a start and on every side of the room the walls seemed alive with nauseous sounds- the infernal scratching and wailing of ravenous alley-cats. I hid beneath the covers. The following day I picked up the slack and let the scum on the street have every ounce of my anguish. The captain seemed almost pleased, for once.

The next night I sat and listened to the familiar song of the damned cat for hours before drifting off to bed like a ghost. As I slowly passed into dream I realized that was probably what it was, the ghost of that damned disappearing cat wailing at me from beyond the veil. In my dream I walked with an old friend of mine, chatting about life and death and the empty spaces between the stars. But it was like looking at a translucent painting, with another picture lying beneath the paint. The harder I strained the clearer it became. Beneath my friend’s face was an ocean, and floating just beneath the waves was a person watching me, backlit by a dim light coming from the murky depths beneath him in the shape of an enormous, staring eye. I visibly shuddered and my friend smiled sadly. His face started slowly dripping and from the depths a hand and a monstrous tentacle reached out as one and dragged me down into the dark.

I awoke sweating and screaming, my heart pounding. I lit a candle and looked frantically around, seeing the walls shake with the incessant scratching. The pounding continued, louder and louder, until I realized it was at my door. I inched closer to assure myself the sound was real, then threw it open. I saw the vague form of a person just as my candle burned my finger and expired. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising; rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea. Something bumped into me- something soft and plump. It must have been the cats; the dirty, ravenous army that feasts on the small creatures of this world. Why wouldn’t they feast on me, slayer of their kin, after reducing me from man to mouse through nights of torture? Shall a king’s guard die at the mercy of street vermin, alone and helpless like the lowlifes? No, no, I tell you, I am not like that filthy beggar in the sewer! Who says I am a king’s guard? …It’s dark magic, I tell you… that stinking cat… ’Swroth, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust… Mutter! Himmlische Mutter!… Erathis… Hilf mir, denn ich habe die Sünde gegessen… Das einzige Wahrheit des Lebens auf der Erde ist der Hunger… Yee…rrlh…Yee…chchch…noghu!

That is what they claim I said when they found me in the morning, crouching in my room over the unconscious, bleeding body of my neighbour, his whole body covered in claw marks. Now they have locked me away in the cells I used to walk past grinning. They talk about me in hushed tones as they pass now, whispering about the state of my mind. The neighbour knows what happened but they won’t let me talk to him. They are trying to suppress the facts, they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the cats, the scurrying cats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the demon cats that race behind the bricks in this cell and beckon me to greater horrors than I have ever known; the cats they can never hear; the cats, the cats in the walls.


End file.
